The surprise in this category came from Wendy’s “pico de gallo” loud-mouth, who actually received the highest number of nominations in this category from the initial reader submissions. But with only 9.15% of the final vote, he was — probably to the relief of both him and his agent — at the back of the pack when it came time for people to vote.

MOST ANNOYING ANIMATED SPOKESTHING
This one came as a genuine surprise to us. The General (of the insurance company with the same name) came out of nowhere with 32.7% to beat the heavily favored Charmin Bears with their prickly, toilet paper-snagging butts (25.8%) along with Geico’s squealing pig (25.2%). Michelin’s bizarre commercial featuring animated road kill dancing in the streets came in last (6.8%), but we’d have to wonder how that spot would have fared if it had been placed in the Creepiest Commercial category.

In the end, it looks like readers just didn’t want to imagine helmet-haired Johnson taking pills to enhance his… jimmy.

CREEPIEST COMMERCIAL
Speaking of imagery just ruining it for everyone, that’s the best way to explain the runaway victory of Liberator Medical’s catheter commercial. Not only is the word “catheter” enough to make many people cross their legs awkwardly, the ad’s opening line of “I had to reuse catheters for the rest of my life” sent chills down the spines (and up the urethras) of 46.37% of the voters. Liberator’s 20% defeat of second-place Old Navy was by far the largest margin of victory in all of WAIA 2010.

Well folks, that’s it for the first ever Worst Ad In America Awards.
We had a lot of fun; learned a little about each other and most importantly, no one got hurt.

UPDATE: With the help of our dear friends at Consumer Reports, we now present to you the winning ad in all it’s glory — complete with commentary by Bob Markovich, Home & Yard Editor. As you can see, his title should really be “Vice President of Awesome.”

Thanks again to everyone who voted, and to the staff of Consumer Reports for lending a hand and, well, tolerating us.

“Oddly attractive” is how she strikes me. I don’t think you’d get a majority vote for her being hot, but she’s kind of a “sum of the quirky parts results in a different kind of cute” I guess. Nothing specific about her is unattractive to me.

Flo just seems like this programmed, lifeless husk who was raised from birth by a Progressive insurance salesman. She lived a sheltered life, and was only ever exposed to Progressive. She loves her insurance too much… because that’s all she knows.

Yeah, Aunt Flo is a euphemism for the monthly menstrual cycle. I am surprised it would be used in a major commercial. Also those silly bears in the toilet paper commercial is a play on the old saying “Do bears sh_t in the woods?” Both commercials make me groan.

I’m with you. The ad that was shown wasn’t the most annoying in and of itself, but if you have to explain why a commercial (or series of commercials) sucks, then I guess it doesn’t belong. (Originally, the “pocket agent” was constantly being interrupted by the d-bag spokesperson — then, realizing their faux pas, SF reversed the scenario.) Regardless, that smug hipster doofus has got. ta. go.

i actually originally saw both versions on the same day during different breaks in the same show. first the guy interrupting the agent and then the agent taking over the speech in the next commercial break.

All of these were either my first or second choice so I can’t say I disagree with the results. Does it mean I watch too much TV if I didn’t even need to watch youtube to find out what any of these were? Or should I just DVR more :-)

Mr. Opportunity wasn’t in the animated category. Which I feel like he would have won in a landslide; none of the choices really stood out as clearly worse than the others, but if Mr. O was among the choices, I probably would have cast my vote without reading any choices past him.

Let’s not forget to mention that the sentence “I had to reuse catheters for the rest of my life” isn’t even grammatical. You can’t do something in the past (“had to”) in the future (“the rest of my life”). It should have been “I would have had to”.

I liked the Staples ad too. Granted the first time I saw it I jumped out of my chair a bit at the first “WOW!!”, but it’s a pretty humorous ad. It’s nowhere near the “nails on a chalkboard” category that those damn cats are in. :-)

I still can’t believe that Ben Stein was a speech writer for JFK back when he was in his early 20s and he’s grown up to be…well whatever he’s grown up to be. Pitchman, MTV game host, whatever. I guess some people will go wherever the pay is highest.

I’m with you on Turn The Tub Around. That ad is so terrible, Megan Mullally and Gerald and Peter Jackson (or whomever owns the rights to that song) cannot possibly sleep at night for having participating in something so awful willingly.

Agreed. I actually thought it was a parody before the second guy agreed with him.

I hadn’t seen any of these ads before. Damn, no wonder Staples won! What’s worse is that this version of the ad acknowledges that this guy screaming is stupid and annoying. “Yeah, we know it’s bad but we did it anyway!”

I didn’t vote in any of this; I only see TV ads when watching Hulu because Adult Swim’s ads have stopped working for some reason. However, I don’t mind the 5-Hour Energy ads: they’re not shouty and they don’t even have music so it’s actually pretty easy to ignore it if you want to. That and the ads don’t exaggerate by showing or implying that people suddenly become superhuman after using it or say that you’re a terrible person for not using it.

At night before I go to bed, I read my book and leave ESPN News running in the background. Many times I will fall asleep with the TV on. But, Staples has figured out a way to be as effective as my alarm clock, with that fool yelling, “WOW!!! THAT’S A LOW PRICE!!!”

I’m only a little suprised that most of my picks “won”… I don’t think there is anything much on earth (that would be allowed on TV anyway) that is creepier than talking about dirty catheters. Oh. My. Goodness.

I thought there were trophies involved with this contest. What do they look like? Do they shout random awful annoying things at the “winner”? Meg tweeted about trophies arriving, so I want to know!

The ‘Pico de Gallo” result isn’t surprising at all considering the voting forms didn’t have a link to the video at first. I know when I filled out the forms, I didn’t vote for videos I couldn’t watch. Having never seen the commercial on television, it wasn’t in the running for me.

i hate that mcdonalds dude, id like to punch him in the face, and j.g wenworth dont even get me started, worst commercial ive ever seen i cannot stand him, if he didnt wake up tomorrow id be cool with that

I kind of love the little piggy; it must be the way he’s holding those pinwheels in his little feet. The commercial itself is hilarious, too, so that certainly helps, whereas the Staples one is just stupid.

What’s sad is that we can expect to see more obnoxious commercials like this one in the future. The marketing people think it’s good for business if you hate their commercials because it’s “brand imprinting” or whatever, even if it’s negative.

The same brand recognition can be achieved with entertaining, enjoyable commercials.

I feel like my career has been spent listening to the marketing department talk down to me about creative and usability differences for which, over the long term, I always end up in the right. I personally interview a range of subjects while they’re working from 2nd or 3rd hand “statistics.”

Horrible. Just horrible. Another clear indication that when America swings left, I go right. I can’t BELIEVE the majority of people voted for those winners/losers. I don’t understand a single one. How did “Mr. Opportunity, I’m knocking” not win EVERYTHING?

In defense of the Newly weds… my wife and I totally went through all the cards we got on our wedding night like that (we had an early afternoon wedding – so even with a long reception, it was still pretty early in the evening)

I KNEW the General would fall hard. It’s a random mascot that has absolutely nothing to do with anything and it’s genuinely annoying.

I’m shocked by Staples’s win though. I don’t watch that much TV so maybe it only gets annoying with frequent viewings, but I definitely laughed the first time I saw that. I laughed at HEB’s parody of it that they showed for a few weeks too. and JG Wentworth is kind of amusing. As far as advertising goes it works too. I can pull their phone number off the top of my head having never called them.

I have to wonder how much frequency of play influenced people’s opinions. I watch all of my television online, with a healthy dose of Adblock, and so I had seen very few of these ads and watched most of them for the first time when I was deciding who to vote for. I think my choices would have differed a lot if I’d been forced to watch all of these ads repeatedly over weeks. (For example, The General just seemed like a sad local ad, and nowhere near as offensive as the Geico squealing pig, but if I’d been watching both of them for a month, my opinion might shift.)

Someone has probably already mentioned this about the catheter commercial but I haven’t had a chance to read through them all… But…..

“I had to re-use catheters for the rest of my life” – Huh? Because she is talking in past tense about the rest of her life wouldn’t that imply that she is dead? If she said “I will have to re-use catheters for the rest of my life” or “I have had to reuse catheters for the past 2 years” – that would make sense. But based on what she says – she is dead from reusing catheters.

Congrats to Staples. Now, the easily-impressed customer ads weren’t the most annoying, nor the stupidest, not as ads, they were just the worst, a combination of terribly delivered false excitement along with general inaccuracy (I’ve personally never seen anything at Staples that I couldn’t get elsewhere for less, ESPECIALLY printer ink) put it over the edge.

– H-E-B Food/Drug in Texas ran a hilarious back-to-school ad that satarized Staples, featuring an H-E-B employee in an office supply store yelling, “WOW! That’s a HIGH price!”. I haven’t been able to find it on YouTube; however if you find it it’s a good 30-second laugh.

– The squealing pig is soooo bad and the Cavemen are well past their 15 minutes of fame. My ultimate fantasy is an ad where the Quizno kittens eat the Gecko, scratch the crap out of Flo and finally climb up the legs and under the kilts of the Capitol One Viking Village People, giving them The Bob Barker Treatment.

– I must be one of the few who thinks the J.G. Wentworth ad is actually funny. Couldn’t The Consumerist have nominated Vince (I got SLAP-CHOPped by a hooker) instead?

My husband hates that Staples commercial so much that he actually wrote an e-mail to Staples a few months ago complaining about it. Better yet, someone responded and apologized that the commercial offended him.

Personally.. the single most annoying and angering commercial on TV for me is that idiotic Rogers commercial where the girl insists on using the guys phone to update facebook, and then she says he doesn’t matter when her friend calls her on her dates phone.

If I were in that situation, I’d take my phone back immediately and tell her to hit the bricks.

I now reserve the right to repeat the same behavior of “WOW, that’s a (insert whatever obnoxious statement here) at the cashier’s and employees faces at full volume in Staples stores.

You see, this is the way to punish companies with offensive marketing. Make the employees hate their lives and then tell them “well, it’s in YOUR fukking ad! Deal!”

I think it would be further fun to record the obnoxious ad and set up one of those robocaller devices to call the creators of such ads (agencies) with their own jerky ad until they scream begging apologies but somehow never found the time to do it. Sigh.

Same trick might also be fun leveled at the personal assistants to the CEOs, or the CEO’s cell phone numbers which would hopefully end up guaran-fukkin-teeing that the marketing whizzes will NEVER be used by the company again.

I further vote for a federal law that the phone number and names of the original creators of each ad are displayed on the last few frames so the creators can own responsibility (get punished back in spades) for their “creations”.

There would be no need for surveys, there would be no doubt about 5 minutes after the first run as to the success or failure of the campaign.

Those are some irritating commercials but they in no way compare to the creepiness and ickyness of the Charmin commercials. I mean come on… We all know what a bear does in the woods. Nice pick up on that old saying but… do we need to have it thrown in our faces so graphically? Hey! look at lil boo boo bear! He has toilet paper chunks stuck to his backside! Oops!! Looks like Papa bear doesn’t know how to wipe! Better get the Charmin! Yuck.